Alice and the Personality Disorder

Janis Freegard

Alice Spider has a friend. Her name is Melanie May. She’s not really a friend - they share the same body. When they grow up, they will have Multiple Personality Disorder. Melanie May will be deluded. I am the Virgin Mary, she will say, the Holy Mother. Alice Spider will be catatonic, and paranoid on Tuesdays.

Janis Freegard is the author of the poetry collection Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland University Press, 2011) and co-author of AUP New Poets 3 (2008). She was born in South Shields, England, and lived in South Africa and Australia before her family settled in New Zealand when she was twelve. She lives in New Zealand’s windy capital city, Wellington, with an historian, a cat, and various spiders. http://janisfreegard.com